Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Speech technologies such as speech recognition and speech synthesis have many potential applications. The Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is an effective framework for modeling the acoustics of speech. HMM-based frameworks for generating synthesized speech are often used in text-to-speech (TTS) applications. However, the quality of the synthetic speech generate by such frameworks may be noticeably degraded compared with original, or natural, spoken audio.